The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England

Subha Mukherji is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Palgrave mini-series Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England, and was Principal Investigator of the 5-year interdisciplinary ERC project, Crossroads of Knowledge, out of which the series, and this volume, emerge. She has published widely on early modern drama and law, law and literature, the poetics of space, literary epistemologies and Shakespeare. Her most recent work is Crossings: Migrant Knowledge, Migrant Forms (co-edited with Natalya Din-Kariuki and Rowan Williams), forthcoming with punctum books in 2024. She is writing a book on Knowing Encounters and editing Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions series. 

Elizabeth Swann is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies at Durham University, UK. Her previous publications include a monograph, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (2020), and she has a new short book, Science as Child's Play in Seventeenth-Century England: Innocence, Experience, and Experiment, forthcoming with Palgrave Pivot in 2024.

This book explores interconnections between the modes of knowing that we now associate with the rubrics 'literature' and 'science' at a formative point in their early development. Rather than simply tracing lines of influence, it focuses on how both literary texts and natural philosophy engage with materiality, language, affect, and form. Some essays are invested in how early modern science adopts and actively experiments with rhetorical and poetic modes and expression, while others emphasize a shared investment in natural philosophical topics-alchemy, chance, or astrology for example-that move among the period's observational texts and its literature, highlighting the participation of literary texts in the production of experimental knowledge. Organised around the broad themes of creation and transformation, mediation and communication, and interpretation and imaginative speculation, the essays collectively probe the presumed dichotomy between science's schematizing and taxonomic ambitions, and the fertile and volatile creative energies of literary texts.

Chapter 1- Poesy and Scientia: Matters of Fancy.- Part I -The Poetics of Alchemy: Making, Metaphor, Transmutation.- Chapter 2 - 'Walking, talking minerals': Men and Metals in King Lear and Bussy d'Ambois.- Chapter 3 - The Imperfect Circle: Hester Pulter's Alchemical Forms.- Chapter 4 - From Philosopher's Stone to Phosphorus: Robert Boyle's Illuminating Experiments. -Part II -Forms of Fortune: Prognostication, Communication, Mercantilism.- Chapter 5 - Love Letters to Fortune: Queen Elizabeth's Lottery of 1567-69.- Chapter 6 - 'The Sunne and Moone of Knowledge'? Mathematical Astrology in Rollo, Duke of Normandy.- Chapter 7 - The Plain Style, Plane Chart Navigation, and the Paradox of Disinterestedness.- Chapter 8 - Commerce, Credit, and Transaction: The Rhetorical Origins of Big Science.- Part III - Reading Nature and Scripture: Interpretation, Speculation, Imagination.- Chapter 9 - Monsignore Agucchi Reads a Letter: Sunspots, Secrecy, and Scientia in the Early Seventeenth Century.- Chapter 10 - The Jobean Apophatic and the Symphonic Unknowability of the World.- Chapter 11- 'Manure thyself': The Poetics of Fertilisation in Early Modern English Religious Writing.- Chapter 12 -  'Instruments' of the Body: The Conflicting Corporeal Hermeneutics of Francis Bacon's Medical Art.- Chapter 13 -  'Pursued Thoughts': Imagination, Raving and Meditation in the Early Boyle.- Chapter 14- Weaving a Web of Light: Science's Poetics.